Lupin arrived at the classroom soon after. He looked a great deal healthier than before, and he had brought a case with him.
"Please put your textbooks back in your bags. Today is a practical lesson — all we need are our wands."
Everyone packed their bags away with a certain amount of suspicion. The memory of Lockhart letting loose a swarm of pixies in his very first lesson last year was still far too vivid.
They gathered in the open space at the front of the room and watched him haul the case over. "There's no need to worry, any of you. There's only a Boggart inside."
A Boggart: a shape-shifting non-being that stands outside life and death, capable of turning into whatever the nearest person fears most.
It is precisely because of that shape-shifting that nobody knows what a Boggart looks like when it is alone — the moment someone comes near, it becomes the thing that person dreads.
Having finished explaining the creature's nature, Lupin asked, "Who can tell me what other beings resemble a Boggart?"
"Poltergeists and Dementors. Both are similar to Boggarts in form," Kate answered without hesitation.
Like a Dementor, a Boggart is a product of emotion, and it depends on emotion to survive.
"Exactly. And the charm that drives a Boggart back is simple enough, though it demands real strength of will. Let's practise it first — repeat after me: Riddikulus!"
A tidy chorus of the incantation rose through the classroom.
"Very good," Lupin said with a nod. "Now then, each of you will come up in turn and put it into practice. Neville, you first!"
The students formed a queue of their own accord. Kate stood somewhere in the middle, together with Hermione.
"I don't even know what I'm afraid of," Hermione whispered, eyes bright as she craned to see the front of the line.
She seemed rather eager to witness something horrifying.
Kate spread her hands. "An exam paper with a fail in every subject, perhaps?"
"No!" Hermione's brows drew together at once. "That absolutely cannot happen!"
So she was afraid of something after all.
Kate shook her head and smiled, watching Ron up ahead fit roller skates onto all eight legs of his enormous spider.
Come to think of it, what was her own fear?
Unbidden, she thought of that long table in her family's manor — and of the figures seated around it, growing fewer year by year.
She drew a deep breath. Cool air flooded her chest, and it steadied her considerably.
That scene came back to her every few days. The fear was still there, but she had long since grown used to it. It was no trouble at all.
Student after student tested the spell. Kate saw wailing ghost-women, mummies, spiders and snakes.
At last it was her turn.
Kate stepped forward and drew her wand slowly. Behind her, she caught Hermione whispering encouragement.
The corner of her mouth had barely begun to lift when the Boggart in front of her shifted out of its mummy shape and into a hunched old man in a hood, propped on a walking stick.
Who was this?
Kate blinked, puzzled. She had assumed the thing she feared most would be that long, empty table.
The old man gave a snarling laugh and drew the hood slowly back, exposing a face burned away across most of its surface.
There were no recognisable features left in it, only a blackened, scorched mass like a lump of charcoal, the char hardened into a thin rind stretched over the bone.
A fiend come back from hell.
His one remaining eye was webbed with broken blood vessels. Shaking, he drew a wand out from inside his walking stick and levelled it at a small child, soaked through from head to foot.
When they saw the girl's face, every student in the room stared, eyes wide.
And Kate, the one it belonged to, clenched her teeth until the fingers gripping her wand creaked.
White hair, black eyes, delicate features. It was unmistakably her as a child.
"What's he going to do to her?" Even Malfoy, watching from the crowd, murmured the question.
"Kate, let me—"
Hermione moved to step up and finish the Boggart for her, but an arm barred her way.
"No need," Kate said, her face drawn taut, her eyes fixed on the old man with something dangerous in them. "I'm fine."
She watched him strike the girl down with his wand, over and over. The child had no power to fight back and struggled desperately to get away, and he knocked her flat again and again, as though it were an amusing game.
In the end the girl had no strength left to rise. She could only lie in the rain, barely breathing.
"My blood — become the key that saves him!"
The old man limped up to her, laughing wildly, and a shaft of white light burst from the tip of his wand, streaking straight at the girl—
"Enough!"
Kate's face twisted as she cut it all short, whipping her wand up at him. "Riddikulus!"
The old man's body swelled like a balloon pumped past its limit, then burst in midair and scattered across the floor as a shower of brilliant fireworks.
Her wand arm was still trembling. She glanced at Lupin, a short way off, then turned without a word and walked quickly out of the classroom.
"Kate!" Hermione spun to catch her — but the Boggart before her, its audience changed, changed with it.
A brand-new Kate stood in front of her.
This one was different in a single detail: her face carried the blue-black pallor that only the dead have.
"I should have died a long time ago. The day I met you, I should have died," this Kate said. "You saw it just now, didn't you?"
Hermione went still. Their first meeting as small children flashed through her mind.
Kate had appeared in front of her out of the rain that day as well, drenched to the skin, shaking so hard she could barely stand.
She remembered loving the pretty older girl from the very first glance.
Which meant...
On that day, had what she had just watched happened to Kate?
The colour drained out of Hermione's face. She reached out, trying to touch this "Kate."
But her fingertips met no warm chest. Only emptiness, seeping a dead wind, a cold that cut down to the bone.
As though death followed her like a shadow.
Hermione shuddered. When she lifted her head again, the "Kate" in front of her was covered in rain-soaked wounds, smiling at her, ghastly and cold.
Her whole body jerked. She snapped her wand up at it. "Riddikulus!"
"Kate" became a fly, blundering about the air — and Hermione swung an angry hand and swatted it into the wall.
Ron and several other Gryffindors edged back a few steps.
Hermione sniffed. "It was asking to be swatted!"
How dare it take Kate's shape to trick her.
Only then did she turn to Lupin. "Professor, I'm going out to look for Kate."
And without waiting for an answer, she pushed through the crowd and ran out of the classroom.
With two students like that on his hands, Lupin managed a wry smile. "The rest of you, please carry on."
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